Monday, January 17, 2011

We're just f**king monkeys in shoes...

Despite much of this rambling, silly, dark and twisted space of mine giving evidence to the contrary, I'm a big fan of the human race. Admittedly, we are, at least physically, far from the most interesting animals on the planet. Sharks have all those rows of teeth, for example. I've just got the one row, and it doesn't even deal with jerky all that well.Tigers, zebras, moths, and loads of other kinds of animals have natural camouflage so perfect, you'd swear it had to be fake, while I could never seem to last more than five minutes into a game of hide-and-seek.  I've seen a horse relieve itself (with both a wee and a two-sie) quite comfortably while running at full speed. If you find me pooping while sprinting, it's a safe bet I'm anything BUT comfortable. It means I'm either being chased by a maniac or have recently made a very regrettable decision on where to have lunch. Even cats have a third eyelid, a fact of which I am happily ignorant most of the time, because eeew. And yes, I do realize that many, many animals have this trait, and we primates are the freaks for lacking it, but one of the benefits of being a dominant life form with the ability to communicate via language is that we get to decide what's gross. More to the point, I get to decide, since I'm better than you.

All the stuff I learned from Animal Planet aside, we humans are still pretty kick ass. We have the aforementioned language skills, so we can speak to one another of the wonders of the world, beauty, truth, and the disgusting, painfully sexual things we're going to do with each other's more attractive siblings and/or parents. We can write stuff like books and greeting cards and scrawl said disgusting, painfully sexual things on men's room walls. We have opposable thumbs (so do most primates, by the way), so we can hold tools and build neat things like houses, pianos, coat racks, chainsaws,  theater sets, skateboard ramps, burning crosses, and so on.

We are, each of us, full of incredible potential from the moment we realize that the world around us reacts to our presence, and that realization arms us with the knowledge that we can do stuff.

And we are aware of our own fragility on a level no other animal quite seems to reach. And that makes us both wonderful and terrible. It causes us to be cruel and kind, both of which are fascinating, one of which is sad (except the kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That dude was kind AND sad.). For a lot of reasons, it is this awareness which makes us the most uniquely interesting creatures on this planet to me. Even more than platypi (though not by much. They're ducks covered in fur with tails like beavers and they lay eggs and are STILL mammals! Because fuck you, that's why.)

Yet, despite all the potential and all the fantastic abilities we possess, we mustn't forget our humble origins. We share a common ancestor with apes and monkeys some brief few million years ago, and with all mammals some few dozen million more before that. Go back a little further, and we magnificent creatures of the land were all fish-thingies with screwed up flippers that happened to be good for getting out of the water for short periods, away from other fish-thingies that wanted to eat us, up onto land where we could fornicate like crazy with all the other weird-flippered proto-fish-thingies. On and on, back to the first set of molecules that smashed itself together in just such a way, creating the first proteins, laying the groundwork for all that DNA we enjoy so much.

Look even a little closely at ourselves, and it's really not hard to spot the places we've come from. We wear clothes like peacocks wear feathers. We groom ourselves  like cats (well, some of us do; I personally haven't shaved in days.)  and fight like dogs over territory. We want to be warm and full, comfortable and safe. And we want to hump like crazy, just like every other living thing in existence (my asexually reproducing homies excepted, of course. Rock on, you funky amoeba. Err...Amoebas. Amoebee?). And really, it's that which makes us so goddamn rock. We can build a skyscraper, fly to space, make long distance telephone calls, write poems, tell great drunk stories, etc. etc. etc, and we still...well, we still just want to eat and sleep and have a place to call our own, so we can survive long enough to, you know, hump like crazy. We're just as connected to our furry brethren as they are to each other, and to us. In the words of someone who put it better than I just did, well before I did it, "We're just fucking monkeys in shoes."



Fuck I love boobs, though...